Sitecore Seeks Differentiation via Marketing Automation

When you are doing well in the market, it's possible that you could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But while you are sitting there drinking your strawberry daiquiri, the market is likely to be shifting and changes may be required.

Sitecore (news, site) understands this well. According to their VP of Product Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia, web content management has become a commodity, plateauing on functionality and UI. For customers, it has become frustrating trying to decide which Web CMS is the right one, when they all seem the same. So what do you do?

Sitecore's answer is to provide a solution to solve a specific problem. In this case, it's an Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

He says that customers are looking to have a bigger problem solved than just creating online content: Why do we need a website and what are we trying to achieve?

Sitecore Offers a Solution

Sitecore has listened to this growing market concern and come up with an answer. They have brought together web analytics, marketing automation and web content management to provide a single comprehensive solution called the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

Sitecore OMS

The Online Marketing Suite will help customers market and sell products and services by creating strong, actionable value at the persona and/or segment level.

Here are some of things you get with the OMS:

A Content Management platform to make changes

Built in Analytical Data

Ability to deliver dynamic content on that data

Multivariate and targeted A/B testing

Campaign Management - Advertising and Email

Lead Scoring and CRM Integration

OMS Campaign Management

Built In Web Analytics

Sitecore has developed its own web analytics for this suite. Guarnaccia explained that you can learn things from Sitecore analytics that you can't get from 3rd party solutions. All data is collected at the session level, providing more detail and the ability to segment visitors, target content and report on those segments.

OMS Analytics

With the new privacy settings that come with browsers like IE8 today, traditional analytics solutions are not always able to provide the level of data needed to segment and profile your customers and potential customers.

Lead scoring is automated for both implicit and explicit activity on the website including things like pages viewed, forms submitted, online campaigns. Even community engagement is tracked.

Taking an Organic Approach

While you can still integrate third party web analytic solutions with the Sitecore Web CMS, Guarnaccia said that Sitecore set out to reduce integration challenges by creating a seamless customer experience across all technology.

Although it was a lot of work, he said that it will pay off in the end. He knows this to be true because Sitecore has been using the OMS on their own website since December. They have learned a lot about their own usability problems that they weren't previously getting from traditional analytics.

Bridging the Chasm

Guarnaccia says that there's a chasm between the tools that tell organizations what they need to do and the tools that help them do it. The Online Marketing Suite was designed to bridge that actionability gap.

And while it is the first targeted solution suite they are offering, it won't be the last. Sitecore will be looking at different horizontal markets and providing focused technology over time.